BELOW: CHILLING INSTAGRAM POST FROM ER NURSE CURRENTLY AT SOUTHFIELD, MI’S PROVIDENCE (ASCENSION) HOSPITAL
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Dear Family, Friends and Complete Strangers, Please STAY HOME!! Love, an ER Nurse
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Glen Ford, BAR Executive Editor
March 26, 2020
The shrinking of the public health sector is a capitalist crime, abetted by the two corporate parties.
“There is now no possibility of avoiding many tens of thousands of deaths due to a shortage of equipment, beds and health care personnel.”
Tens of thousands of people, disproportionately Black and brown, are marked for death by coronavirus in the coming weeks and months because the United States political system allows only corporate parties to govern. By ensuring that the Dictatorship of Capital is immune to effective electoral challenge, the duopoly system has made the people of the United States less healthy than the rest of the developed world, and far more vulnerable to epidemics of all types.
As dutiful servants of Capital, the Democratic and Republican parties have for more than 40 years facilitated a Race to the Bottom (austerity) that has steadily lowered working people’s living standards and slashed social service supports, including the number of hospital beds, which have declined by more than half a million since 1975 despite a population increase of 114 million.
“The pruning and hyper-privatization of medical care was overseen mainly by Democrats in the big cities, and largely by Republicans on the state level.”
In Washington, D.C., the late Al Phillips, President of AFSCME Local 457, at right, talks to reporter during Detroit Health Department locals 457 and 273’s participation in national march against the first war on Iraq in 1991. The Detroit Health Department was later privatized, with its Herman Kiefer headquarters and city-wide clinics shut down, and all workers laid off,
Barack Obama and his Democrat-controlled Congress saved the oligarchy from self-destruction in the Great Recession, and then collaborated with the resurgent Republicans in a “Grand Bargain” to ensure that social services, including local and state public health systems, would never recover lost revenue and personnel. The pruning and hyper-privatization of medical care was overseen mainly by Democrats in the big cities, and largely by Republicans on the state level, with both parties in general agreement that the public health sector was less “efficient” and “innovative” than for-profit medicine.
The public health sphere became even more dependent on private suppliers, including overseas sources. Inventories of ventilators, masks and other equipment and gear were kept to a minimum, in line with the private sector’s “just-in-time ” profit-maximizing philosophy. But time ran out when the coronavirus hit, and there is now no possibility of avoiding many tens of thousands of deaths due to a shortage of equipment, beds and health care personnel.
Hugo Chavez, the late president of Venezuela, the late people’s hero Fidel Castro of Cuba, and Evo Morales, President of Bolivia, in Havana, Cuba in previous years. The U.S. Department of Justice just charged Chavez’ successor Nicolas Maduro as a drug racketeer in the midst of his battle to save the Venezuelan people from capitalist plunder, foreshadowing a likely invasion there.. Evo Morales and other progressive Latin American leaders have been overthrown by U.S. operatives.
The shrinking of the public health sector is a capitalist crime, abetted by the two corporate parties. Not content to lessen the life-chances of their own citizens, the duopoly parties screamed for sanctions that have crippled the health sectors of Venezuela and Iran, killing tens of thousands before anyone had heard of COVID-19. The United States is a global vector of suffering and death, through the policies of its corporate party tag-team. When deadly diseases are set in motion, the crime becomes mass murder-suicide.
Donald Trump is singularly stupid, incompetent and self-dealing, but these very qualities make him incapable of effecting any fundamental change in national systems, for good or ill. Congress rebuffed his attempts to cut funding of the Centers for Disease Control — but that matters little in the current crisis because there is no national health system for the CDC to bolster, direct and rally. U.S. healthcare has been shrunken, privatized and made wholly incapable of coping with mass contagion – which never arrives “just in time.”
“Without single payer healthcare, no national system is possible.”
It was too late long before Trump. And, if Fast-Talking-Slow-Thinking Joe Biden succeeds the Orange Menace next January, there will be no prospect of constructing a true national health care system. Biden says he’ll veto a Medicare for All bill if it comes across his desk in the Oval Office. But without single payer healthcare, no national system is possible.
In effect, Biden is campaigning for president on a platform of mass death. Biden’s biggest supporters — Black Americans — will continue to die in disproportionate numbers whichever of the two corporate parties is in power because the Race to the Bottom (Race to the Graveyard) is ruling class policy, and both parties serve the ruling class.
Presidential candidates Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden.
If, by some miracle, Bernie Sanders becomes the Democratic nominee, and then president, his legislative agenda will be opposed by the bulk of his own party officials and officeholders. The corporate party faithful have rallied around Hapless Joe because he can be depended on to defend the interests of the party’s rich funders – to continue the Race to the Graveyard. To make sure that Democrats understand who is boss, the world’s 8th richest oligarch, Michael Bloomberg, is purchasing the party outright (see “Bloomberg Wants to Swallow the Democrats and Spit Out the Sandernistas ”).
Bloomberg this week transferred $18 million of his campaign funds to the Democratic National Committee – actually, money that he previously transferred from his own accounts to his self-funded presidential campaign. The DNC will soon be answerable directly to a New York billionaire whose mission is to make the Democratic Party an even more hostile environment for austerity-busting politicians like Sanders and his young enthusiasts. Medicare for All is an austerity trip-wire that shall not be crossed, but without a single payer system there can be no national health care system.
Health Care for All rally May 30, 2009/Photo Courtesy Greencare
Nevertheless, those Americans that survive the Great Epidemic and Meltdown of 2020 will demand a New Health Care Deal. Having been frightened out of their locked-down wits by the crisis-induced realization that economic precarity is the national working class condition, many millions will also demand a new social contract that provides for a modicum of economic security.
But these are concessions that the Democratic Party, overseen by Bloomberg-the-Enforcer, cannot champion. Infectious disease and growing immiseration and precarity are crises for the masses, but the cure – an end to the Dictatorship of Capital – represents an existential crisis for the ruling class. The revolution will not be organized in the Master’s houses – Democrat or Republican.
BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com .
Another horrifying indication of the brutal response of this system to the needs of Black, brown and poor people is seen in the following letter Henry Ford Hospital is giving to people going to their ER in the heart of Detroit, which has become the nation’s leading city in new coronavirus cases. Detroit activist Jamon Jordan, who is experiencing symptoms, provided a copy of the letter on Facebook. His mother has also passed.
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This Whole Operation / Takeover By Big Business Is Called
***CORPORATE COLONIALISM***
They Have Worked On This For Years!!
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